


wanna feel alive (outside i can't fight my fear)

by CassandraStarflower



Series: lovely [3]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, It's JASON, Jason Todd Has Issues, Jason Todd-centric, POV Second Person, Present Tense, his life fucking sucked
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 11:07:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29099271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CassandraStarflower/pseuds/CassandraStarflower
Summary: Jason Todd, death, and trauma.A character study of the “bad Robin”.
Relationships: Dick Grayson & Jason Todd, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne
Series: lovely [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123244
Comments: 2
Kudos: 22





	wanna feel alive (outside i can't fight my fear)

**Author's Note:**

> There are very vague references to underage prostitution and drug use in this fic. Just a warning. They are implied, not explicit at all.

You live in the worst part of Gotham. You don’t know anything else, just the twisting alleyways and dark corners of Crime Alley. 

You live in a tiny, shabby apartment deep within the district, with your mother and father. Your father drinks a lot and has loud arguments with his friends which always end in broken glass and the sounds of fighting. Your mother at first is fine, loving and quiet and protective, but she gets sick, eventually. 

That’s what she tells you, anyway. You know better. 

By the time you’re six, your father has you on the streets, pickpocketing the unwary and bringing home the money. If you don’t get enough, and your mother is too out of it to fight for you, you sleep outside the apartment in the cold. 

Your father is arrested several times. The last time, you are eight. Your mother gets sicker, taking more and more and more. 

She lasts for a year and a half before you wake up one morning, curled in her arms in the cold apartment, and find her unmoving beside you, skin like ice and chest still. 

You cry. You shake her, again and again, pleading with her to wake up,  _ please.  _

She doesn’t. 

You are alone, and you know that social services will take you away and you will never be safe again. 

At least on the streets, you have some autonomy, right? 

(Right?)

You are nine years old, almost ten. 

You walk out of the apartment for the last time with a backpack holding food and money, carefully tucked beneath some falling-apart books and clothes. You zip it tightly shut and stay away from the other people on the street. 

You survive by pickpocketing at first. 

It is not enough. 

(You are ten years old. You should not know the things you do. You should not be doing the things you are doing to survive.) 

(But you are trying to survive. It is not your fault.)

You are eleven when you start stealing tires instead. 

You are twelve when you find the Batmobile, parked all alone in the depths of Crime Alley, and you stare at it for some time, staring at the tires that could get you so much money, waiting for Batman to appear. 

He doesn’t. 

You grip your tire iron tightly in both hands and you walk up to the massive car and you take off two tires and hide them away before going back for the third. 

That’s when Batman shows up. 

You nearly have a heart attack on the spot, clutching your tire iron behind your back as Batman looms over you and asks you where you put the tires. 

You tell him you don’t know about any tires. It’s a lie, and a desperate one at that- 

(Everyone always says that Batman doesn’t like criminals. That Batman hurts people. At least, that’s what some people say. A lot of people. You don’t know. But you’re a criminal, sure enough, you steal from people and- the other thing is a crime too, you’re pretty sure.)

-you end up hitting Batman with the tire iron and running. You don’t get very far. 

Batman just asks you to put the tires back, and once you do, he asks if you’re hungry. 

You are. But you can’t just  _ say that. _

(You do anyway. Batman gets you food and then, somehow, you end up going home with him.)

The first few weeks are very difficult. You trust Bruce Wayne less than you trust Batman, and he isn’t quite sure what to make of you half the time. 

(You don’t trust rich men. Especially rich men who take in a young boy with no apparent  _ cost _ for all of this… it doesn’t make sense to you.)

Somewhere between the massive library and the lock on the inside of your bedroom door, you figure things out. 

… Bruce isn’t so bad, really. 

Even if Dick’s a  _ dick. _

You’re not sure what his problem is, but he fights with Bruce near constantly, and you hate it. 

You’re Robin now, and you know how to fight and how to protect yourself, and you’re saving people’s lives and protecting them, going out on the streets of Gotham and saving people. It’s good. Important. 

Somewhere along the line, Bruce becomes your father. 

Dick sort of warms up to you, a bit. You go out for ice cream once, and he occasionally calls you  _ little wing, _ when he’s not being a jerk. 

You wish he was better, but this is probably the best that a street rat like you could hope for, right? The protection of a billionaire (who also happens to be Batman), a big safe house, plenty of food,  _ books, _ school, clean clothes, showers whenever you want… 

This is the best you could have ever hoped for. 

You  _ are _ happy here, as happy as you’ve ever been. 

Until. 

Things start getting rough between you and Bruce. 

And. 

And you’re fifteen years old and Felipe Garzones has just fallen off a balcony and Bruce thinks you pushed him. 

He’s benched you. You’re sure that the next step is kicking you out. That has to be his next step. Right?

So, before he can, you leave. 

You try calling Dick. He doesn’t answer. 

(Later, you will learn that he wasn’t on Earth when you called. That he didn’t find out what happened for weeks.)

(Later. Much later.)

You go to your old apartment, get a box from your old neighbor, and find out that Catherine wasn’t your mother. 

_ Sheila Haywood. _

It’s worth a shot, right? 

You find out where she works and go to Ethiopia. 

Bruce catches up to you. You don’t really talk about anything, not then. But he helps you go talk to Sheila. 

Even if he first cautions you not to trust too easily. You ignore this with all the teenage arrogance and rebellion in your heart. 

And Sheila… 

Sells you out. 

To the Joker. 

(As you lie there, in that warehouse that you rushed to wanting to save your mother, you wonder if this is what family always leads to. Pain, betrayal. Loss. The Joker stands over you and smiles.)

You lie there in that warehouse, pain flooding your broken body, and you watch the timer counting down on the bomb that you can’t disarm. 

You’re going to die. Unless Bruce gets there first. 

You cling to that idea, to Bruce getting there in time to save you. 

_ 00:01 _

He doesn’t.

The warehouse explodes. 

You die. 

But you don’t  _ stay _ dead. 

You wake up in stifling darkness and panic, clawing at the velvet above you, at the wood, at the dirt- 

You claw your way out of your own grave and stagger twelve miles before collapsing and being hit by a car. 

You don’t know much of what happens next- hospital, leaving again on your own, the streets. 

Talia al Ghul finds you there on the streets, and brings you to Nanda Parbat, where she tries to help you recover. 

Your mind is empty and you are a shell of a human being. 

She, running out of time as her father grows ever more impatient, dumps you in the Lazarus Pit. 

You wake up in blinding green and scream, exploding out of the water, lashing out, screaming and screaming- 

Talia takes you somewhere else, tells you that you remain unavenged, that your father has replaced you. 

With another Robin. Another child thrown into Batman’s crusade. 

Tim Drake. 

Your  _ Replacement. _

You are so angry that it blinds you. You rage and hurt and lash out.    
You take up Talia’s offer of training and train hard with a number of teachers, learning everything you can from the scum of the earth and then killing them. 

Talia gives you a nod each time and sends you on to the next one. 

You learn from the All-Caste, too. 

You don’t kill them. 

You go to Gotham, filled with rage, and call yourself the Red Hood. 

It’s meant to mock the Joker, using his old alias against him. 

You slaughter your way through the gangs, killing the scum and taking control. 

Batman notices. 

You kidnap the Joker and try to make Bruce kill him. 

Bruce doesn’t. 

You are still so angry. 

You kill more people. 

Eventually, you try to kill the Replacement. 

You fail. 

You see the look in his eyes as you loom over his broken body and you hesitate. 

It’s a mingled look of despair and betrayal. 

How dare he feel betrayed, when he was the one who took Robin? When he stepped right into your shoes and became Bruce’s son, Dick’s little brother, the  _ perfect _ Robin?

You ignore the little whisper of  _ he’s just a kid, just like you were, it’s Bruce’s fault not his. _

You keep killing people. Bruce doesn’t try to arrest you, surprisingly. You wonder if it’s some lingering sense of guilt. 

He should feel guilty. You  _ died. _ He was too late to save you. 

(You want him to save you again. Some tiny part of you is screaming out against the violence, against the death, desperate to just go  _ home _ and be Bruce’s kid again.)

(But every part of you knows that you are not Robin anymore. You are not the same person you were at fifteen. There is no space for you in Bruce’s family anymore.)

Eventually, Bruce dies. 

You feel numb in the aftermath. You can’t tell if you’re grieving or not. 

You think you are. But not as badly as Dick, now wearing the cowl, as Tim, who’s vanished off the face of the earth, as Cassandra Cain, who’s run off to Hong Kong. 

You’re not quite sure what to make of Damian Wayne, Bruce’s little offspring with Talia. 

She never told you about Damian. You don’t know how to feel about that. 

(Sometimes, you wonder how much truth she ever told you. You wonder how much she lied about. You wonder if she was just manipulating you all along, building the perfect weapon against Bruce.)

Bruce comes back. 

Eventually, you make a treaty with the rest. You stop killing. 

(It helps, actually, much as you hate to say it. You feel less out of control.)

You start to figure things out with the others. 

You come back to the family, bit by bit. Start spending more time with the others, in costume. Dick seems determined to make up for every bit of arguing and every single snide comment or angry remark that he ever made to you. 

Tim is cautious. But he always seems to be that way. 

Bruce seems desperate, almost, and is so, so careful when he talks to you. Trying so hard not to set you off. 

(You hate feeling like a bomb set to go off at any moment. You hate knowing that everyone else sees it too.)

Damian is all snide comments, but he says those comments to everyone except Dick, Bruce, and Alfred. 

You discover that while you were dead, extremely angry, and trying to murder everyone, you gained several siblings alongside Damian. 

Stephanie probably counts, even though she’s not legally adopted and has her mother still. She only seems to distrust you a little bit, and most of that seems to have to do with Tim. 

Cassandra, the ex-assassin, you kind of knew about. You had honestly assumed she was Babs’, not Bruce’s, but it appears that she is both. 

Duke is nice enough, and only distrusts you a healthy and normal amount. At first. Before you start hanging around him more and he gets to know you well enough to lose all fear of you. 

(It’s not as bad as you pretend.)

You come home, eventually. 

You start working through things, figuring out your relationships with the rest of this fucking family. 

It’s a work in progress. 

Tim stops giving you those wary, kicked puppy looks that you kept getting after trying to murder him. Dick tells you that Tim used to sneak around and take pictures of Batman and Robin, mostly while you were Robin. You have a minor heart attack at the thought of a tiny preteen child following vigilantes through the worst parts of Gotham. Dick, the  _ dick, _ laughs at you. 

Bruce looks less and less like he is being stabbed through the heart every time he looks at you. You’ll take what you can get from him. Emotionally constipated asshole. 

You learn, eventually, that Bruce nearly killed the Joker. That Superman had to step in to save the Joker’s life. 

You learn that Dick did kill the Joker, and that the clown was resuscitated. 

(You ask  _ why the fuck _ and no one really has an answer for you.)

You figure things out. 

You have your family back, and maybe this time it will be better. 

You come home more often, you (reluctantly, thanks Dick) join movie nights at the Manor, you spend more time with the others. 

It’s nice. 

You sit on the couch with Steph asleep on one shoulder and Duke sitting on your other side, with Tim settled on the same couch without that wary alertness (he is, in fact, half asleep and wrapped around Steph, possibly with some of her hair in his mouth. You are not going to coo. It is  _ not _ adorable.) 

You’re not sure what the movie is. The whole family is in one room, watching the screen. It’s animated, that’s all you know. 

Half the family is asleep. The other half is quiet, soaking in the movie and the soft feeling in the room. 

It’s nice. 

You’ve still got your family. 

(Even after everything, you are still a part of a family. Even death could not keep you away from them forever.)

**Author's Note:**

> I didn’t write much about the warehouse because many wonderful authors already have, and it’s such a horrible thing that it’s hard to write about. The Joker fucking sucks.   
> Also, canon what canon? Timeline what timeline? IDK what the timeline on this is, exactly. Or any of these fics.   
> Come find me on tumblr @cassandra-starflower!


End file.
